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Saturday, 2 February 2013

New Set Blues - GateCrash

Oh hello there - long time no see! Do I have you in round 1? A preview of the finals already then! What have I been up to? Well mostly GateCrash these past few weeks.

That makes £279 on Magic in two weekends. ouch! That said - with the £60 of eBay things that have gone it's a reduced £219 - and I plan to make it go down further. To explain what I have I guess I should go through in order - more for my own sanity than anything.

Preorders I - the bulk.

I decided that buying a box was fun fairly early on, but then always wanted to play that box. At £90 I figured that if I did a similar amount of drafts and sealed and averaged at £2.50 a pack then I'd be fairly sorted. I also realised I'd be missing all the neat tricks commons and uncommons. 1 £25.14 preorder later and those were all booked - 4 of each uncommon, and around 6 of each common. I may need to trade for a few that I get 3 ofs but it should be OK. These are 'incoming'.

Preorders II - the junk

I like gadget rares, and with pre-odrering the lower cards I had spare funds to cherry pick a few. I think I got maybe (redoes maths - oh!) £50 of those, which does sound quite a lot now. The plan was to spend less on events though.

Preorders III - the shock

12 cards, shocklands, 84.51 or £7 each. This is scary & ouch territory except they are currently £10 each in the stores and any spare ones I pull can now be back converted to pay off the main bill. Also these are stable cards so where as the others will go up and down these will settle around £6-£8 so can be treated as fluid assets in MTG terms.

Tired at the start, fever rose through the event and I was misplaying like a trooper by the end. 2-4 to scrape 1 pack and throw away the extra £10 of travel costs from playing the much easier Birmingham event (that actually gave correct prizes this time!) meant that I was heavily overtaxed by playing Orzhov.

7 packs - £33 - £4.71 per pack (OUCH!! should have got a fatpack and stayed in bed!) for event
18 packs - £58 - £3.22 per pack so far

Also - my pulls were rubbish. Having planned to draft these packs with the semi-pros on the Tuesday I instead spent three days in bed sulking due to some insane fever I still haven't quite shaken. Massive missing out of EV there as I'd have got at least a few things I wanted as it wasn't even the good junk rares.

Third event - Waylands Launch Draft
I'd been looking forwards to this quite a bit. The hazy, crazy part of my brain had been mentally preparing myself for Tuesday's draft, and then carried on til Friday as I didn't get it out of my system. All of the talk from the 30 players in the room was how bad Dimir was in sealed, I guessed it'd be pretty swift in draft so in my 10 person pool tried it out. being the only person in an archetype gets you a few interesting cards, three unblockable rogues, three mill guys, one intimidate 1 drop & two cloudfin raptors. 3-0. I came 2nd due to a player who had an amazingly fast Gruul deck. As again Boros threatened me most I figured Gruul may be next. 3 packs played and 4 prize ones plus promo.

Why was this £52? I paid for 4 people to enter as my cousins came to stay. I can't really factor those in to the packs can I? Especially when they got to keep their mythics... :(

Fourth event - Global Gaming Launch Draft
We like Global Gaming, it's small and local and full of people like me - only younger! They out play us easily, and often have better decks due to being focused, but they lack limited experience so can be interesting to draft against. I got a first pick bulk mythic dragon which I can NEVER resist in limited, so built Gruul around that - it was pretty cool and only lost to one guy. Once in rounds, and again in the final. Oh well - another second place! As we'd agreed to split the packs evenly instead of 5 I got 7, hooray! He got a shock and a guild leader, I got the black mythic that is another bulk one. Such is life. Maybe I should have kept ALL these packs sealed...

10 packs - £12 - £1.20 per pack (now we are talking!)
35 packs - £83 - £2.37 per pack and only one short of making a box across all events!

Not only did I play the box instead of sitting at home trying to stop the cats from attacking my foils I also played in events I may not have and got a few sneaky trades in. Sure I spent an extra £39 on funding the cousins, but I'm sure I can trade that back off them as they get bored of the shiny mythics (although they have discovered eBay too - curses!)

So that is
£83 - packs/events
£39 - Youth contributions
£157 of pre-orders/speculation
so £240 on me, minus the £60 from eBaying 4 mythics that I'd never once sleeved to play (2 sorin, 2 Thundermaw) so £180 down so far.

Not a bad way to buy and play a box, and in theory I think some events I could have done better in by chosing more carefully and not playing sick! I have three of the shock lands I'd already pre-ordered so that's £30 back at some point (probably in trades) and other interesting things like the Ghost Council which are money rares that I'll never likely play.

Another draft Tuesday too, better get cataloguing and eBaying some more to pay for this...